See What’s Happening Above and Below with Weather… WOW!

When was the last time you took a few minutes to appreciate a cloudless blue sky or the calming sound of wind flowing through the trees? Even dreary rainy days have a certain feel to them. Perhaps it’s time to download a handy weather app that does more than just the basics.

Weather …WOW!, developed by Ynfo.Apps, consolidates important weather information and local news into one solid app. Now you can go outside and bask in the sunshine while knowing exactly what’s going on in your local area.

Concept and Functionality:

Being the self-professed weather junkie that I am, I get extremely excited when I’m introduced to a new weather app. I like apps that can be as simple or as complex as the user would like, meaning it needs to contain everything that’s essential to getting a “big picture” of what weather conditions are like. Weather …WOW! is a beautifully designed app that not only shows you vital weather information, but also provides you with local news headlines.

Weather …WOW! uses gesture-based navigation, meaning each direction you swipe on the screen reveals a new page. For example, swiping your finger to the right shows you the seven day forecast for your area. Swiping your finger down allows you to edit your list of favorite cities, along with the ability to make aesthetic changes like °F/°C and themes. Lastly, a swipe to the left will reveal detailed current weather conditions like cloud cover, humidity, barometric pressure, and wind speed.

While Weather …WOW! claims to support cities all around the world, I was unable to check the weather in my tiny rural hometown. Instead, I had to search around the area for supported towns. Even when I found a location that was supported by the app, it wasn’t able to load the latest news headlines.

Weather ...WOW! + Latest News!

Features:

Weather …WOW! has a ton of awesome features. For example, if you’d like to read local and national news headlines, you can do so right within the app. Simply tap on the headline you’d like to read and watch as the app takes you to the article’s webpage. While this might not be an issue for iPad users, I do believe iPhone users would be at a disadvantage because of the small screen. An easy way to fix this would be to add a button to the article window that would allow users to open it in an external browser.

There are a couple of suggestions I’d like to make, though, one of which is the ability to toggle windspeed measurements between miles per hour, knots, and meters. Also, perhaps an added news filter feature so you can choose if you wanted to receive only local headlines, national headlines, or both. To go further with that idea, perhaps future versions would even allow you to choose which topics you’d like to see headlines on.

Lastly, I do want to mention that Weather …WOW! is universally compatible with both iPad and iPhone, but I’m unsure if that means that your favorite locations are backed up and synced across multiple devices. This would be another great feature to add if it’s not already available.

Value:

Weather …WOW! is available to download from the App Store for $1.99, which isn’t terribly unreasonable considering how many features the app has. However, if you’re not ready to take the plunge and you’d like to try the app first, there’s a free version available to download.

Weather …WOW! is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Requires iOS 4.3 or later. This app is optimized for iPhone 5. A small expedite fee was paid to speed up the publication of this review.